That June day was suffocating. All day the radio reported summer storms. As the day wore on, the news turned to relaying where tornadoes had touched down and the extent of the damage. When you live in Minnesota, tornado watches are not uncommon.
Our children reacted to the weather in ways typical for their personalities. Our daughter, Jayme, was seventeen and easily alarmed about any crisis. She talked incessantly about everything and anything trying to release her anxiety with her words. Our son, Seth, was fifteen and not concerned at all. Never one to get excited about bad weather, he could sleep through most storms. Our second son, Zachary, was ten and had been struggling with an abnormal fear of summer storms for several years. As soon as the snow began to melt in March, he would begin to follow the weather reports.
He needed constant reassurance that we were not in the path of threatening weather. Many times that evening I reassured him that there was no way that we would ever have a tornado at our house because the chances were just too slim. Our youngest son, Noah, was just six and he seemed unconcerned with the weather as he played with his Legos and asked for more cookies. Noah often surprised us with his profound questions and discerning observations. His hazel eyes often reflected understanding far beyond his years.
Around 9:30 p.m. we decided that all of the bad weather had passed us by. The children went upstairs to bed. I made some popcorn and settled in to watch the ten o'clock news. When the weatherman flashed the current conditions map on the screen, I noticed a lone red intense weather spot on the map just about where we live in Renville County. I called for my husband to come quickly and look. As the words left my lips, the winds changed outside. Our children came running down the stairs from their bedrooms and our only words to them were “Get to the basement!”
As we descended the slanted, linoleum-covered basement stairs, I could hear the town warning siren. The air had become so heavy that the eerie scream of the siren carried all the way to our house. Its unfamiliar sound intensified my fear.
Our basement was just a rock and dirt foundation. There weren't a lot of big, heavy objects to hang onto or hide behind. With nowhere else to go, the kids and I huddled together in the southwest corner, grabbing onto each other and the water heater. Our panic allowed no room for concern about spiders or mice or any of the other usual basement inhabitants. If they were there, they were just going to have to move over and make room.
My husband thought about doing his usual "manly" duty of staying upstairs to “keep an eye on the weather.” This time something felt different and he quickly changed his mind. The rest of us were barely in the basement when he ran down the stairs and slammed the old wooden door against what he had seen coming across our field. He crouched down and put his shoulder into the door trying to keep it closed against the tremendous pressure on the other side.
Upstairs, windows began to break, boards began to creak, and debris pelted our house. A sharp-edged board broke through the basement door just above my husband. He immediately moved closer to us. The house was actually bouncing up and down off the foundation!
My stomach contacted. My heart raced as I realized that we were in danger-this was real. It was not like any other storm I had ever experienced. My feelings were of fright and,
more than anything else, of inevitability. What would happen would be inevitable. There was nothing we could do-no where we could run. The children echoed my fears, in their eyes and in their continued cries.
Noah whimpered and kept repeating, “I'm too young to die.” Jayme grabbed my arm and pleaded for an answer to her question of “Are we going to die?” Seth said nothing. And Zachary said very little. He was living his worst nightmare. There were no words to describe it.
I didn't know the answers to their spoken questions or silent pleas. I was struggling with my own personal mental image of what I perceived as possibly my imminent death, and even more terrifying, the deaths of my family.
Suddenly, I knew we should pray. Not pray for deliverance but pray for strength to endure the inevitable. We grabbed hands in to dark, damp underground place. With our house breaking above us and the wind raging against us, we prayed the Lord's Prayer. It was prayed out loud by six frightened souls looking to their God for comfort.
